Rick Moody - The Diviners

Suddenly both girls are on the line, indicating that they will consider this. They will have a quick phone meeting while she’s on hold with Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, and they will also consider the Brazilian waxer and then maybe they will try to reach Mercurio. And Madison goes back to the music that sounds like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but there’s no one there. Soon she gets another incoming call, but actually it’s just Barclay, who has called back on a new line because it was faster. They are talking on two different lines now.

“By the way, who is Otis Redding?”

“You don’t know who Otis Redding is?”

“Don’t make me feel stupid, you bitch.”

Barclay cackles. Madison claims to be just kidding about not knowing. But she’s not kidding, and she’s not letting on that she’s not kidding. Meanwhile, in her innermost core, which is surprisingly sweet, Madison McDowell will do almost anything not to let anyone know that she is a virtuoso on the violin, that she was in the All-City Orchestra, first violin, and had the chance to play with the Philharmonic when she was sixteen. She has never mentioned this thing about the violin to the Vanderbilt girls, for example, nor to Vanessa Meandro, and she has put the violin under her bed, and she has not tuned it lately, because if she tunes it and her mother is in the house, her mother will get all weepy about how great Madison was on the violin. Her mother will observe that any man would love a girl who bows the violin the way Madison McDowell bows. Sometimes she waits until her mother is out of the house and her father is traveling on business, and then she takes the violin out of the case and fits it under her chin, and she tightens the bow, and she plucks the strings a few times. Then she sets the bow on the strings, and there is the long low trembling of the G and D strings, and the vibrato as she moves up through first position. And then there is the first melody she plays, when she is rusty and alone and willing to be the violin player that nobody knows. Just to have practiced something, some scales, and a little J. S. Bach. She is unthinkable without the violin because she is sublime only on the violin, and her posture is perfect, and her ear is perfect, and she hears the locking counterpoint of string quartets in her future, never to be, and that’s why the other passion project she is developing is the story about the violin maker Stradivarius, who, although he made the greatest violins in history, was actually a libertine and a reprobate, at least in his early life, and, in this story, Stradivarius goes from bedding French prostitutes and playing bawdy songs on his sublime instruments to helping a Prussian general scheme against foreign intrigues. But then he experiences the ennobling of courtly love, you know, in the person of the daughter of a viscount, whom he cannot have. Something like that. And, of course, he makes the greatest violins in history in order to capture the sound of the voice of his beloved, because the value of love is commensurate with difficulty of attainment. The writer of the Stradivarius script, a guy she met at Fashion Week, a guy who tried to get her number, is still working on the third act. Vanessa has no idea why Madison likes all the historical stories, why she likes Napoleon and Stradivarius, but she thinks maybe she just identifies with the romance of women from costume dramas, and besides, girls love those kinds of movies and flock to them, like if you could get Lacey, the teenybopper, to play the chaste Elsa in the Stradivarius movie, then you’d have something that would really bring the girls into the theater in big flocks.

Barclay, on the other hand, doesn’t know about Otis Redding, and she doesn’t know anything about violins, and she got thrown out of a number of private high schools here in the city. Unless it’s a Swedish imported car or some tacky kind of champagne that costs five hundred dollars a bottle, Barclay doesn’t have a clue, but Sophie, the other Vanderbilt Publicity girl, knows about this kind of thing, a little bit, just because her father has an entire performing arts wing at NYU named after him. That’s how the Vanderbilt partnership works out. Barclay Weltz worries about the billing and doesn’t bother to get her eyebrows dyed. She goes to these parties wearing designer jeans and with her bra showing under her shirt, and she plants gossip items in the papers about people she doesn’t like in order to have them ruined. And Sophie Fiegelman closes the deals and plays the good-cop part. It’s Sophie who told Madison that she was their choice this month and that it bespoke a fabulousness that Madison should be very proud of. All the more reason why it’s scary when Sophie’s voice rings out, breaking through the interstellar white noise of the on-hold signal of Barclay, likewise breaking through the on-hold signal of Zimri, Internet start-up guy, just as Madison is climbing out of the cab at the side entrance to the Rockefeller Plaza.

Sophie’s voice is agitated. “Oh, my God, you guys, I just got the worst news! You won’t believe it!”

Barclay says, “What? What?”

It’s almost midday, and the skaters are already doing their thing, and the colors are bright because it’s autumn. No time is as perfect as autumn, even if you’re a development girl on the phone with hack publicists and you are late. Madison listens absently and walks down to the edge of the rail overlooking the rink. The holidays feel like some fever up ahead, and that’s what she’ll remember thinking when Sophie breaks the news that this girl she knows, Samantha Lee, from one of the galleries — beautiful girl, knows a ton of people — she was walking in midtown yesterday and this guy, some guy, he just came up behind her and he just smashed her head with a brick, just took this brick and swung it at her head and just totally knocked her out, like, knocked her down on the street, and then she was on the street with her skull all smashed in and bleeding and everything.

“Oh, my God,” Barclay says. “That is so awful. That is so horrible. That is so sad. Is she dead?”

“She’s in the hospital. It’s all over the papers.”

Madison says, “Did she go to Lenox Hill? She should definitely go to Lenox Hill.”

“What party did she come to?” Barclay asks.

“She came to a lot of parties,” Sophie says. “You know who she is. She was going out with that guy, what was his name, the painter guy.”

And that’s what Madison takes with her, along with her impatience and her irritation, on the way into the office. She is carrying the name of a woman who got her head smashed in by some guy on the street, and it’s all kind of too much, the prospect of Vanessa is too much, so she pretty much turns right around and leaves, to meet Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, for lunch at the new Indian place on Forty-eighth Street, because why not? Madison likes a guy who doesn’t have to look through a hundred calendar pages before he can make a lunch date, or who at least has an efficient secretary, and she also really likes a guy who is standing when she comes in. Slow this instant down for a second, how about? Because the most important part of the day is the part you spend at lunch, and she does the important phone calls in the cab and then she just goes straight to lunch, because lunch is a legitimate expression of business.

Zimri Enderby is pleased to meet her, and Zimri is cute, and Zimri has an oblique smile that is endearing and impossible to pin down at the same time, like no matter what you say to him, you will not be able to figure out what he thinks. He holds her seat for her, and touches her on the biceps, just faintly, a brushing past of the fingertips, like he’s the archaeologist and she’s the intact vase in the peat bog, and then he sits. There’s something stern about Zimri Enderby. That’s what Madison thinks, even though he also has a button-down collar on his shirt, it’s so frigging preppie, are Mormons preppies? And he orders everything as if he’s familiar with it. Well, so he’s a Mormon who knows how to order Indian food. And pleasantries get exchanged, according to some etiquette manual of pleasantries. Zimri hints about how he thinks the election will turn out, and Madison is tempted to say something, but the Vanderbilt girls, when they decided that Madison was the selection for this month, they insisted that she not say anything about politics for the entire month, no matter what, because no one pays any attention to politics anyhow and no one ever got a business started by caring about politics. The only thing you need to know about politics is that a check of a certain size will buy you access to politicians of any party at any time. Ten thousand bucks gets you all the access you need. Zimri is the kind of guy who could write a check of a certain size.